Alexandre Dumas published Le Comte de Monte-Cristo as a newspaper serial in 1844-1846 — the same period he was finishing The Three Musketeers. The two books made him the most-read French author of the nineteenth century. Monte Cristo is the longer, darker, slower-burning of the two and is, by most modern counts, the greatest revenge novel ever written.
Marseille, 1815. A nineteen-year-old sailor named Edmond Dantès is about to be made captain of his ship and married to the woman he loves. Three men envy him: a jealous shipmate, a rival in love, and a magistrate with a secret. By that evening he has been arrested as a Bonapartist agent and locked, without trial, in the cells of the Château d'If. He spends fourteen years there. He befriends a learned old prisoner named the Abbé Faria who teaches him six languages, history, and chemistry, and who, before dying, gives him the location of an enormous treasure hidden three hundred years earlier on a small Italian island called Monte Cristo. Edmond escapes by sewing himself into the dead man's burial sack. Ten years later a mysterious figure named the Count of Monte Cristo begins to appear in Roman and Parisian society. Each of the three men is destroyed in his turn by means he never identifies.
The B2 adaptation runs across twenty-five chapters and keeps the entire spine of the original — the engagement party, the prison, the abbé, the escape, the cave, the long return, the ruin of Danglars, the suicide of Fernand, the madness of Villefort, and the famous closing words to Maximilien: wait, and hope.
Dumas was a serial novelist paid by the line, and his French is built for fast reading: short paragraphs, constant dialogue, vivid scene-changes. The B2 adaptation keeps that pacing. The novel's length comes from the number of scenes, not from the difficulty of the sentences. By chapter four the reader is reading what is effectively a thriller in nineteenth-century French.
Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Count of Monte Cristo was originally written in French, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B2. Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Count of Monte Cristo is rated B2, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.